Videotelephony services are evolving, meaning that there will be more mobile phones in the future which have two or more camera elements on two sides of the housing of the mobile phone. One of the camera elements (a back camera element) can be located on the back side which normally is directed away from the user of the mobile phone when the user holds the mobile phone in front of his/her face. The other camera element (a front camera element) is usually located on the front side of the mobile phone i.e. the other camera element is then directed towards the face of the user. In other words, during a video call, the front camera element is focused on the user, and the other party of the call can see the user on the display of the other party's phone. The back camera element can be used for shooting pictures or video with a camcorder application, and the display of the mobile phone can be used as a viewfinder.
When there are two camera elements, easy and intuitive selection of the active camera element has importance. During a video call the front camera element is normally used wherein the other party of the call can see the face of the user but sometimes there may be a need to switch to the back camera element e.g. to show the other party of the call what the user sees, and again back to the front camera element.
In prior art mobile phones the selection of the active camera element is done by pressing a key or keys of the keypad of the mobile phone or using some other selection method of the user interface (UI) of the mobile phone. This can be quite cumbersome and may not be very easy to perform during the call.
Some videotelephony capable phones have only one camera element, which can be mechanically turned in different directions (front and back) but it may not be easy to direct the view of the camera element to the correct direction.
Also when the camera element is turned from one direction to another the image seen by the camera element varies a lot. The image processing element of the camera element may interpret this kind of variation so that there is a need to transmit more accurate image information compared to a situation in which successive images only has a few differences between each other. Therefore, the phone may unnecessarily transmit image transmission during the movement (turning) of the camera element from one direction (e.g. from the view of the face of the user of the phone) to another direction (e.g. to the view which the user of the mobile phone sees). The other party of the call may not be interested in the images the camera element takes during the turning of the camera element.